My name’s Dano and I’m a designer. I’ve recently worked with Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab and at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. I’m also the designer at n+1, a Brooklyn-based journal of literature and contemporary criticism.
Go deeper at my portfolio.
It’s an amazing time to be a designer, right? Print and web design are both healthy and full of surprises. These are three of favorite projects from the last twelve months.
Link rot kills academic citations and Perma.cc kills link rot. It provides scholars and legal professionals unbreakable links to the digital sources cited in their work by creating permanent replacement web archives of those urls. I helped Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab take a hard look at Perma.cc from a usability perspective. We focused on making every element of the experience more consistent, reliable, and predictable. We looked at the typefaces, colors, and button shapes, but also at the words we use to describe and label the product and its parts. We built a trustworthy, bulletproof responsive design to take Perma.cc from a promising, popular beta to a polished 1.0 product. See more of my work on Perma.cc
Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab is amazing. Their newly-announced Free the Law project might be a big part of their legacy, but the people at the Lab are building new stuff all the time, and improving old things as well. I guess that’s something I really appreciate — that the future doesn’t always have to replace the present (or destroy or disrupt it), it can build on it, strengthen it, and discover the forgotten strengths and successes of the past as well. I’m so happy to know that libraries and our noncommercial institutions of public knowledge have the smart, passionate people of the Lab fostering their continued role in the digital future. I was fortunate to be their Designer-in-residence for 2015. Together we built a new website! If it’s half as appealing and impressive as the Lab itself, I’d consider it a success. See more of my work with The Library Innovation Lab
The Berkman Center is the intellectual hub of the internet. They’d probably hate that hubristic hub-and-spoke analogy because of who they also are: humble and committed to openness, equality, and the promise of an open Web. (I’m sure they could explain why hub-and-spoke is problematic in great detail, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t so!) And this humble/hubris center-of-a-centerless-space paradox is the heart of The Berkman Center’s core challenge — to organize how they talk about themselves — their accomplishments, their many projects and fellows, and their organizational mission, with clarity, honesty, and focus. In other words, they needed a hierarchical structure to communicate their non-hierarchical structure. I helped The Berkman Center prioritize and organize their image of themselves. And we created an printed brochure that would help them talk about what makes the Center so special. In doing so, we helped lay the groundwork for a larger communication strategy. See more of my work with The Berkman Center